President Trump presents the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk during an event at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., October 8, 2026.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
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“We tamed electricity, invented the light bulb, developed the airplane, harnessed the atom, unleashed the power of personal computers, created the Internet, pioneered superintelligence, and invented almost everything else of genius and great importance anywhere in the world,” President Donald Trump boasted on Thursday. “We will always be on top. There is nobody that can compete with us.”
The remark came from the White House’s “Science: A New Golden Age” summit, an initiative by the Trump administration to accelerate American scientific research and development with artificial intelligence technology.
Trump announced that a group of companies—including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Palantir, and Amazon—have committed over $2.4 billion to the Genesis Mission, which advertises itself as uniting Department of Energy labs with “industry, academia, and more to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science, and national security.”
The additional investment into the Genesis Mission, which the president launched in a November 2025 executive order, comes as his administration continues to eliminate government funding for critical scientific research, among them, as my colleagues have extensively reported, studies into chronic diseases and climate change.
Trump also awarded several leaders of those tech companies with the National Medal of Science: Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and semiconductor firm Advanced Micro Devices’ CEO Lisa Su. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Dell CEO Michael Dell were given the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
As CNBC pointed out on Wednesday, each of the medal recipients has contributed financially to Trump or Republican causes. Musk was Trump’s biggest financial supporter, at nearly $300 million, in his 2024 presidential campaign. Nvidia’s Huang donated to help fund the White House ballroom and gave $1 million for Trump’s presidential inauguration ceremony. Microsoft, under Nadella, also contributed $1 million to the inauguration. Dell is a longtime Trump donor who provided $6.25 billion for “Trump Accounts”—$250 seed contributions for 25 million children.
And according to his most recent financial disclosures from September, Trump bought or sold shares in Nvidia, Microsoft, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Tesla, Advanced Micro Devices, and Dell.
Trump, in other words, is replacing established research institutions with the for-profit corporations who have curried favor with him. Whether AI will be able to replace millions of dollars in lost federal research funding at bulwarks like the National Institutes of Health is less clear.
